living fully. fully living.

Exercises in Futility?

Everyone needs to have something to work toward. I hate change, but change in the sense of personal betterment is a different thing entirely.

Stagnation is an absolute killer. In stagnation is where we meet complacency. I’m pretty staunchly against complacency. I’m against it because it is both boring and dangerous.

I think that complacency leads to an underlying desire to never change. And when we don’t change, we stop learning. Which ultimately leads to ignorance. And I refuse to be ignorant…about anything. Politics, philosophy, religion, life, anything…there should always be a desire to learn, change, and grow from learning from and about these things (and so much more).

And so, for the next 15 weeks, I am choosing to learn from the last several years of my life (as respects my schedule v. school) and change my patterns of behavior.

I am terrible about keeping in contact with people. I see people on Facebook from when I lived in Canada (a year that, without question, ranks highly on the list of Best Years of My Life) that I just never talk to. I find that disturbing and even more so when I find that all of those people are still talking to each other and yet I am so uninvolved in their lives. These are people that I shared one of the most important years of my life with and I am in constant contact with NONE of them. And of my year in Minnesota (that ranks highest on the list of Worst Years of My Life), I am in constant contact with exactly ONE of those people. I may have hated every second that I was there, but there are at least a handful of people that I connected with dearly and just don’t talk to anymore. It’s strange.

And as my life continues this progression of…life, I find that I have fewer friends than ever before, but the ones that I have, I count as precious. Yet at the same time I say that, I also have to reprimand myself a little bit for not making more time to cultivate those relationships. I cannot remember the last time *I* called someone else to catch up, hang out, anything.

The next 15 weeks will be an exercise that hopefully will not end in futility. I intend to spend time with at least one girl friend at least one time each week, regardless of day or time.

Additionally, this is an exercise in creating free time for myself. Something that I have been historically bad at doing.